Any Sound-Engineers online?

hey

i´m working on a redesign of a room for (learning) presentations.
maybe (if the legal cases causes no problems) it sould be possible, that the audience of the presentation is recorded (for analyzing their reactions after the presentation).

to install 2 cameras is not the problem (by the way, if you know good USB or firewire cams, please post your experiences). but recording the voices could be difficult.
the room is: 5.5 meter width and 6.5 meter long. the audience sit (in 3 lines) in the back 2/3 of the room (like pupils in school).
any idea how to record the voice preferably balanced of as many listeners as possible? and which microphone?

and (additionally), any recommend (on the shirt pinnable) microphone for the presenting student?

i have not that much experience with audio technology...


thank you very much for you help

Basically everything depends on the desired quality of the outcoming audio.
If you want to hear falling a needle, you´ll need a lot of expensive equipment.
(at least two microphones, a pre amp and a recorder)

The best alternative is imo a handy recorder:
http://www.thomann.de/de/zoom_h2.htm

i forgot to mention that all streams (voice of the mics and video from the cams) have to be sent directly to a pc (the pc is the audio and video recorder). the presentation-system (which i will develop) will encode it and store it in the intranet of the university.
so a seperate audio recording no solution for the task.
the idea of the presentation-system is: switch on the devices, press record on a GUI, present your presentation, press stop and you have your presentation on your network-account

my problem is that i have not much experience with audio-systems. for example: shoudl i use a wireless or bluetooth mirco for the presentator? what are the differences?
if i need a pre amp, which one suits best to which micros?

If there´s a good audio interface in the pc, you won´t need a pre amp.
Poor interfaces will introduce a lot of noise.

I can´t give you a good advice for a headset like microphone -
but you have to make sure, that it is optimized for speech.